ted that it was the duty of all
Paris to go and die on the ramparts rather than suffer the entrance of
a single Prussian. It was quite natural that the spirit of insurrection
should show itself thus, should bud and blossom in the full light of
day, among that populace that had first been maddened by months of
distress and famine and then had found itself reduced to a condition of
idleness that afforded it abundant leisure to brood on the suspicions
and fancied wrongs that were largely the product of its own disordered
imagination. It was one of those moral crises that have been noticed
as occurring after every great siege, in which excessive patriotism,
thwarted in its aims and aspirations, after having fired men's minds,
degenerates into a blind rage for vengeance and destruction. The Central
Committee, elected by delegates from the National Guard battalions, had
protested against any attempt to disarm their constituents. Then came an
immense popular demonstration on the Place de la Bastille, where there
were red flags, incendiary speeches and a crowd that overflowed the
square, the affair ending with the murder of a poor inoffensive agent of
police, who was bound to a plank, thrown into the canal, and then stoned
to death. And forty-eight hours later, during the night of the 26th
of February, Maurice, awakened by the beating of the long roll and the
sound of the tocsin, beheld bands of men and women streaming along the
Boulevard des Batignolles and dragging cannon after them. He descended
to the street, and laying hold of the rope of a gun along with some
twenty others, was told how the people had gone to the Place Wagram and
taken the pieces in order that the Assembly might not deliver them to
the Prussians. There were seventy of them; teams were wanting, but the
strong arms of the mob, tugging at the ropes and pushing at the limbers
and axles, finally brought them to the summit of Montmartre with the mad
impetuosity of a barbarian horde assuring the safety of its idols. When
on March 1 the Prussians took possession of the quarter of the Champs
Elysees, which they were to occupy only for one day, keeping themselves
strictly within the limits of the barriers, Paris looked on in sullen
silence, its streets deserted, its houses closed, the entire city
lifeless and shrouded in its dense veil of mourning.

Two weeks more went by, during which Maurice could hardly have told how
he spent his time while awaiting the approach